Hey all,
Below is our abstract. Enjoy.
Liberalization versus Sustained Openness?
Remodeling the Impact of Democratization on the Initial Move to Free Trade
Is the process of democratization associated with trade liberalization in
lesser-developed countries? Milner and Kubota (2005) argue that the
transition to democracy prevents political leaders from using trade
barriers to secure electoral support: their empirical analysis finds a
positive relationship between democratization and openness. Using
nonparametric matching procedures, we demonstrate that these results
conflate the impact of democratization with simple policy inertia:
governments who have liberalized their trade regimes in the past are more
likely to sustain liberalized trade regimes in the future, despite the
democratization of their political regimes. We then employ a rare events
logit model to show that there is no association between democratization
and the initial onset of trade liberalization.